BIZARRO THEATER FIGHTS BACK! UPDATE ON THE FIGHT AGAINST GOOGLE AND FIXING THE CHARTS YOU RELY UPON!

Many readers know that Google programmers initiated a takedown of Bizarro Theater over a few programming mistakes made by myself. Nonetheless, Google will fail to prevail in their takedown.

Slowly, I am re-building the linkages between sheets as IDs have changed under the new Google Drive account. Please be patient. It should be only a few days at most. I must tread through over 400 blog entries to see what charts were there and one needs to be fixed and what needs to be made new.

Along the way, I have learned a bit and feel I should share my experiences.

First, if you have Google Drive, do not use Google Drive from your primary Google Gmail address, ever, Instead, setup a Gmail Account exactly for having Google Drive. Assuming you rely on Google products, here are the steps that you can protect yourself from the titanium fist of Google's dictatorship:

1. Sign up for another Gmail account specifically for your Google Drive
   e.g., my-google-drive@gmail.com
2. Log into this email account.
3. Go to Google Drive
4. Download and install the Drive app
5. Set the app to sync to your Drive Folder
   Note: if you have the app installed, go into preferences and unlink your account and then link it to your new Google Drive Gmail
6. From Google Drive on the web, decide on folders you want to create files and edit files
7. Share those folders to yourself at your real Gmail address, anointing your real Gmail as an editor
8. Every file you create, you must "download as" the Microsoft equivalent in case Google decides to kill your account, which they can, anytime for any reason.
   You want to do this because the "files" that show up in your Google Drive folder in your directory tree on Windows aren't files at all. Rather those names are merely symbolic links — text description in the JSON layout that can be parsed by a Javascript virtual machine.
   So if you download a spreadsheet once you create it in Google Spreadsheets, you'll get an actual file that you can use with MS Excel or upload again to Google Drive for use with Google Spreadsheets.

If you work this way, you can keep your real email address (I lost mine) and have all the files you need to upload should the worst case happen to you.

I like Google. I am grateful for their many apps. However, their lack of live customer support and legitimate dispute resolution has me considering a move to Microsoft Onedrive and Excel at a later date.

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BIZARRO THEATER THREATENED BY GOOGLE! GOOGLE BOTS HAVE BLOCKED MY GOOGLE DRIVE ACCOUNT!

During testing to add new features to Bizarro Theater, a likely automated process at Google has blocked my Google Drive account.



Here is what I was doing:

• I ran a SQL-like query on a spreadsheet to extract only two columns of the data from a spreadsheet.
• I saved the downloaded data to a text file.
• I copied the text file to a publicly accessible folder on Google Drive.

And here is what happened:

• I forgot to change the sharing settings on that spreadsheet to anyone with a link
• So while I thought I was downloading two-column dates and numbers, instead, I downloaded HTML.
• The Google Drive filtering program on uploads must have read the HTML, which I am guessing reads "Not Authorized to this" (I'll check)
• And then I received notification that my Google Drive has been suspended!

As all of the charts for Bizarro Theater run from that Google Drive / Gmail account, I don't know what will happen to over 400 blog entries. For now, the charts seem to be working.

In the meantime, I am trying to get up a new Google Drive account complete with syncing. Having done some of that already, I see that many spreadsheets created with Google Spreadsheets could not be copied to the new Google Drive account. In effect, the program that handles uploading to Google Drive sees those files as "corrupted."

Most of those "corrupted" Google Spreadsheets contained only data generated from other Google Spreadsheets that I own.

There is no one to call at Google to tell my story and plead my case. There is only a stupid online form. I have no idea if anyone at Google with review the form submission. 

Effectively, by suspending my Google Drive account, Google has made my Gmail worthless along with Picasa (Photos), all of the sign ups to countless services I used either my Gmail address or Google one-click log in as well as G+.

From a technical standpoint, heed this:

EXPORT EVERY GOOGLE DOC AND GOOGLE SPREADSHEET IN THEIR MICROSOFT EQUIVALENT LAYOUTS, THAT IS AS MICROSOFT FILES. 

The files that you see on your local hard drive of Google-made documents aren't files at all, but merely links data encoded in Javascript, specifically in the JSON.

Here are a few screenshots of what I downloaded that Google programmers thought worthy of me having my Google Drive account banned and hence wrecking all of my Google accounts associated with the same email address:

Because behind the scenes, the HTML had these codes. Notice the object "botguard" with an associated function and a huge string of data being passed.

And more code dealing with "anti-spam." 

And this is a shot of the SQL query on sheets that I can't access anymore.

Google computer programmers ("software engineers") need to explain how anyone can spam himself. It looks like Google does nothing by IP address. Because if they managed Google Drive accounts and highest-level access by IP addresses, this would not have happened to me.

This is such a mess for me to clean up.

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SMARTWATCHES LACK SMART DESIGN. SIX, TWO AND EVEN, OVER AND OUT.

The Android smartwatch and all copy cats seem to be produced by those with limited imagination. Even the footprint seems stuck in the standard watch face.




These "smart" watches can do little and require an Android-based smartphone with the latest specs and Bluetooth to work.

By the time you command your "smart" watch to do something with your smartphone, you could have retrieved your phone from your pocket and used your phone directly.

For now, the smartwatch Google many have rushed to make seem to be little more than a device providing almost nothing consumers seek. "Smart" watch design seems little more than wishful desires of Dick Tracy childhood fantasies.

Instead of the standard watch face, someone could have made a rectangular watch face, 4 cm x 15 cm. That size is about half the size of a ruler.

The interface could have featured sinistrodextral text scrolling. Scrolling messaging could have leveraged GPS presence to present shopping offers, RSS news feeds and more.

Much more intel could have been presented in a 60 cm² surface.

In effect, such a "watch" would become a smartphone for one's forearm.

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FROM THE DOTCOM ERA AND BEYOND, AMAZON TRUMPS ALL

According to GeekWire, a $1,000 investment in Amazon from the IPO would be worth $239,045. That is 239 times return on money staked.

eBay and Yahoo end up as great investment decisions. Google ends up as an OK investment decision. Comparatively speaking, LinkedIn ends up as a weak decision and Facebook ends up as a quite bad decision.

Now let's take those numbers above and truly put those numbers into perspective. Look at those surprises!

On a yearly basis since the respective IPOs, Google ends up being the second worst investment though yielding a bit more than 1.5 times Facebook. Yet, for years, the chatterheads on CNBC, Bloomberg and elsewhere on blogs have decried Yahoo! as a poorly run business while singing praises for Google.



What is the lesson here? Jeff Bezos and the succession of execs at eBay have proven the real money on the Internet comes from selling goods packaged in boxes along with brokering sales of goods packaged in boxes.


Social media fail to make good investments. The costs associated to run social media are high. Yet, in spite of growing revenues, revenues fail to exceed costs.

Look at Twitter. The kiddies who run Twitter never have been able to turn a profit in seven years! According to 
Bloomberg, in a recent filing, Twitter execs reported doubling revenue in its third quarter of accounting, yet those execs could only do so by quadrupling their losses.

All should be surprised even when professionals take over Twitter after the IPO, that Twitter ever turns a profit.

By wasting untold resources on G+, Google execs have drifted far from their model as a digital billboard by pushing ads on anyone's internet property through Doubleclick and AdMob. For the hundreds of millions Google execs squandered on G+ and G+ related acquisitions, these same execs could have added an alike functionality to Blogger for pennies per blog. Blogger already supports advertising welcomed by tens of millions of Blogger users.

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GOOGLE. SERGEY BRIN, LARRY PAGE. INNOVATORS OR ACQUIRERS?

Google? Innovators or acquirers? 

Almost every important Google product, execs at Google bought outright. For their own, homegrown products, Google execs have bought other firms to make their products work. 

• YouTube came from YouTube for $1.65 billion
• Blogger came from Pyra Labs

• Android came from Android for $50 million
• Motorola Mobility (cell phones) came from a spin-off of Motorola for $12.5 billion

• Picasa came from Picasa 
• Picnik came from Picnik

• Maps came from Where 2 Technologies
• Earth came from Keyhole
• Latitude came from Dodgeball
• Panaramio came from Panaramio

• Docs came from Upstartle's Writely
• Spreadsheet came from 2Web Technologies' XL2Web
• Sites came from JotSpot

• Feedburner came from Feedburner for $100 million
• Google Analytics came from Urchin Software

• Offers came from DailyDeal for $114 million

• Voice came from Grandcentral for $45 million

• Groups came from Deja News

Primarily, Google is an electronic billboard advertising business. Everything that goes into Google's key business would not exist and could not work without acquisitions. 

AdSense, a key product offering, came from a mash-up of Applied Semantics, Sprinks, dMarc Broadcasting, Adscape, Teracent, Invite Media, Admeld.  Google's billboard model came from Doubleclick on the desktop and Admob for mobile.

YouTube couldn't run without key acquisitions of YouTube itself along with On2, Omnisio, fflick.

Almost everything that goes into G+ to make it cool has been acquired by Google execs. 

• GTalk voice came from Gizmo5 for $30 million
• Hangout came from Marratech
• Hangout also came from Meebo for $100 million

And now Google has swallowed well-liked and easy functioning Bu.mp. 

Google is more like Berkshire Hathaway rather than an inventor and seller of products. It is hard to make the case that a couple of grad school nerds who hit life's lottery and became billionaires are innovators.

Enjoy the big list of acquisitions by Google execs.

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